Authenticity, Role-Playing and Leading Double Lives in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris

One of the movies that had been on my watchlist for a very long time, we may be even talking decades here, is Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious and controversial Last Tango in Paris. Bertolucci was known to often push the envelope, yet in this case, it may have backfired a bit. It seems that the film got a lot of attention and publicity for the wrong reasons and for its somewhat shallower and superficial aspects, which overshadowed its different strengths alongside the depth expressed in this idiosyncratic film.

The frankness and vulgarity can feel shocking and even jarring to this day, whereas the graphic nature and the explicitness in terms of sexuality fail to compare with other films that have radically pushed ahead and passed and surpassed many taboos and boundaries since the inception of this film. Arguably, this may have been due to the existence of Bertolucci’s groundbreaking Tango and let us not forget that famed French enfant terrible filmmaker Catherine Breillat appears briefly in it; still, there is more than meets the eye and much more to this movie than its controversy.

In fact, the strength of this film lies in what it has to say about its characters and their relationships with themselves and with others, including but not solely pertaining to issues of sexuality and the physical expression thereof. Furthermore, the film brings up and touches upon various themes that play with notions of reality versus fiction, lived versus imagined lives, and wishful thinking versus the reality of things. On the surface, it is an anti-romantic and anti-idealistic film but somehow it ends up holding and containing certain elements and seeds of romance and idealism within its dark heart.

To further explore this, the symbol of the double is of relevance. Interestingly, the word double has in fact two meanings. On one hand, it is a copy or mirror image of something or someone, while on the other hand, it is a splitting and separating into two, which may contain unequal or unwanted parts.

In the first instance, we have a type of doppelganger, someone who looks, acts or thinks as we do. The focus is on similarities, which can be eerie in some cases, and it is not unlike being identical twins. A cinematic equivalent of this would be Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique where it seems that the same person is simultaneously living in two different parts of the world (Weronika in Poland and Veronique in France) as a type of carbon copy or duplicate of the other. This double life is as if the same soul had been split into two equal or equivalent parts of the self with each leading its own separate existence miles apart.

Yet sometimes, the double is the shadow or the shadowy self, the parts within us we don’t acknowledge or do not wish to, and this has been exemplified in the push and pull of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for instance. The personalities lead a double life as there are two different sides to them that for one reason or another are hard to reconcile within the same person and their shared environment.

In fact, the art of filmmaking falls somewhere between both realms. Some filmmakers may create an alter ego, a character that shares many similarities with its creator, say Guido in Fellini’s 8 ½. At the same time, no matter how faithful the representation may be of the real person or real things and events, the film only manages to reflect them and can only be based on them as it is not able to fully and accurately capture the entirety, the same way a snapshot does not give us the full picture.

The problem is that the event cannot be identical with its representation, no matter how hard one tries, and the closest you can come to a potential replica would be to do a documentary on it; and yet, focus, editing, and other filmmaking choices can slightly - or significantly - distort the issues and facts at hand.

Let us now discuss the different doubles and their reflections, deflections, and mirror images in Bertolucci’s film. Please be aware that from now on there will be major spoilers and do proceed at your own caution. You can of course watch the film first and then return but again, you may need to proceed with caution.

 

The Double Life of Paul

The main protagonist played by Marlon Brando creates a double life for himself. His wife has just committed suicide, and he feels angry, lost, and in limbo. He is looking for a place to stay and then meets Jeanne by accident. It is not that he is sexually attracted to her (at least not initially) as he shows little interest in her or anybody else for that matter. Both are just taking or filling up space in an apartment that feels as dark and gloomy as Paul’s soul.

Yet suddenly and with little warning, he grabs her and makes love to her. It is instinctual and animalistic and has very little to do with any type of feeling. She goes along and does not resist him. Then both walk out, each their own way. But something lingers within each of them, so they decide to continue meeting for these clandestine sexual trysts, but he sets the ground rules from the beginning.

It is essential, he proclaims, to stay away from personal details and information with absolutely no names whatsoever. Each would remain anonymous in this artificial space, and they would agree to never meet outside of the confines of the apartment. After a while, Jeanne finds this frustrating as she has become curious about this strange enigmatic man. Oddly enough, it is this air of mystery that makes him so appealing to her. It is not difficult to see and understand why she is intrigued by Paul, especially after we meet her fiancé, the bland and self-absorbed Tom. But more about their relationship later.

As to Paul, he is grieving but he also displaces his anger, frustrations, and personal failings upon this young woman who has happened to cross his path at an importune time. He is cruel to her at different points of their time together. This makes Jeanne uncomfortable and yet she keeps returning to him and continues taking the abuse and humiliation that he inflicts upon her. This reaches its most extreme point when he anally rapes her while spouting nonsensical phrases about family and religion.

When taken in conjunction with his request to being fingered by her and then spouting vile and disgusting images of pigs and bestiality involving Jeanne, it made me wonder whether the character had been abused by the clergy. In another scene regarding his wife’s funeral arrangements, Paul vehemently opposes his mother-in-law to have priests present at the service while in another scene he almost beats up a man while angrily calling him a “faggot.” There may be homosexual tendencies or traumatic experiences that these scenes and situations insinuate or point towards, especially when taken and considered in connection to each other.

The sexual frustration and the double motif also existed on the side of his wife. For a handful of years, she, the hotel owner was living with one of the guests, an ordinary and insipid-seeming man called Marcel. In fact, she turned him into a stand-in Paul as she got matching bathrobes for each and re-lived and re-enacted similar or the same routines with either one of them.

The scene where both Paul and Marcel are sitting next to each other in identical bathrobes after the suicide of their respective wife and lover has a surreal touch to it; it also underscores the hinted double life that Rosa had during her marriage with Paul. Her lover Marcel went along with the charade and did not counteract or oppose Rosa’s wishes and desires. Soon enough, the passion ran out, but they still pretended to be a duplicate version of the joyless marriage she had with Paul who was residing a few hotel rooms away from there.

After Paul, in a moving and emotionally stunning scene, pours out his heart to the corpse of Rosa surrounded by an array of flowers and with make-up on her pale motionless face, he seems to change his air. Suddenly, he comes to or becomes more himself and then passionately pleads Jeanne to stay with him. Jeanne who up to then had merely been a projection of Rosa with all his bottled-up hatred and resentment aimed at her suddenly becomes a different person to him. Although he had previously turned her down and even mocked her for confessing her love to him, he now wants to start anew and begin an actual relationship with her.

At this point, Paul breaks all his made-up rules, goes up to her on the street, gives his name, tells her his age and that he is a widow and that his wife has committed suicide. All these intimate details pour out in a frenzy and in less than a minute. He also shares with her later that he owns a hotel and that he would now like to be and live with her.

This sudden move has its opposite effect. Jeanne may realize that she was never in love with him but that she rather loved the persona, this fictious double that he had created for her. As a result, she loses interest and decides to break up their relationship (or whatever it was that they had previously). Instead, she prefers to get married to Tom. In typical fashion, Paul cannot accept this and starts chasing her down the streets of Paris in another surreal scene that borders on the comical in its emotional overreach and intensity.

Before the film and Paul, the American, reach their respective end in her Parisian apartment, I would also like to point out the fact that Brando did not stick to the script but added his own flourishes and lines throughout the movie. The infamous and humiliating use of butter, something that the actress Maria Schneider had not been aware of was indeed his idea. There are other lines that stand out and look and sound improvised and probably were not part of the script.

Instead of simply being an actor that plays the character, Brando was modifying the role as he went along by adding a more personal dimension to Paul. This is Paul as imagined by Bertolucci and reinterpreted by the actor Marlon Brando. The alter ego becomes another double that is split apart from what the original character was supposed to be like and this occurs and evolves during the process of acting and filmmaking.

 

The Double Life of Jeanne

Jeanne seems like a person full of energy and zest for life who has unfortunately settled for an artificial relationship with wannabe filmmaker Tom played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. In this sense, I cannot help but think of Bertolucci, the director who is trying to express his desires, wishes, and fantasies alongside his pain and confusion via the medium of images, words, and sounds.

Yet, there is a hint of criticism there as Tom is as shallow and vapid as they come. He does not seem capable of true feelings and in fact lives in a world of fantasy in which there is nothing else but he himself and the movies. This can be seen from the moment they first appear together where he wants his crew to film everything they say and do, no matter how private and confidential. She is, according to him, the main subject of his next film.

There are various other scenes in which he supposedly explores Jeanne’s childhood and past including her first experiences of love and romance, but it is serving only the purpose of making an “authentic” documentary-style film. In this case, what is real is turned upside down and is put on its head. Although Jeanne expresses her feelings, he is less interested in her than capturing all this to make a movie out of it. It is exploitative in nature and serves only his own purposes instead of appreciating and respecting her feelings.

In that sense, Jeanne is just a character he happens to marry for the intents and purposes of making a movie about a man who decides to get married to a woman like Jeanne. He does not explore her because he is not interested in her as a person while he himself has little if anything to offer because he does not have a self or personality to speak of.

What is it that Bertolucci intended to say or show with this film? Part of it is of course the desire to make a film that pushes boundaries but also it talks about how we create doubles in different shapes and forms in our lives. It could be a double of ourselves, where he split into two seemingly incompatible beings, Paul in his two versions, Jeanne as Paul’s lover and Tom’s fiancée, Rosa as Paul’s wife and Marcel’s lover.

In each of these cases, this lack of authenticity creates a vacuum that accentuates the pain and suffering underlying each life. At the same time, since each of them fails to connect with their own nature, they are incapable of connecting with other people and their relationships become a bundled mess that lacks honesty, integrity or any type of sincere feeling or sentiment.

Final Thoughts?

In the end, we can create works of art via sublimation, but we must be aware to distinguish one from the other or at least not get confused between the two. Reality is a tricky thing and the moment you try to capture it, it seems to fly off the handle. Yet at the same time, we do not want to live in a world that is purely of our own making; we ought to rather find or settle for a comprise and integration of the two while continuously trying to find or be ourselves or remain authentic to what we believe to be our true nature.